Microsoft on January 8th announce availability of a new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. According to Microsoft "G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud". I decided to run a series of CPU-intensive tests on a G2 VM (4 cores, 56 GB) created in the West US region. For the test I used 7-zip (64-bit, v 9.20) to compress these 8 text files. 106,624 ConfirmedDates.txt 137,160 DataLoadTracking.txt 684,637,229 DEfile.txt 4,456,322,407 DEMfile.txt 1,951,333,329 EPfile.txt 12,975,399 ProgramTitle.txt 2,303,480,896 SWDfile.txt 24,168,394,643 SWOfile.txt Compression mode was configured (in the '-m' parameter) as Low (-mx1), Fast (-mx3), and Normal (-mx5). The text files were placed on the D: drive within the G2 VM (this is a local n